For companies, the ‘Should I? Shouldn’t I?’ debate over the need for an official Twitter or Facebook account is long redundant. Quibbling over a relatively small detail is to ignore a much larger question: What steps are you taking to manage your digital real estate?
As digital platforms grow, brands have a greater online presence. While this is a positive development, with this increased connectivity comes discussion around digital asset ownership and management, as the issue of digital real estate becomes a pressing one for brands. There’s a distinct perception lag as to the sheer amount of existing accounts and instances, not to mention the users controlling them and the influence they hold.
In previous years, brands may have thought it adequate to have a Twitter account or Facebook page, but with the growth of the Internet, it’s a highly narrow view of the digital landscape to focus on active official accounts alone. There may be one official Twitter account, but there could also be a further 200 unofficial profiles or pages set up by employees, fans and detractors littered throughout the web.
It’s unwise to look to control every conversation about your brand, even in the world of social media there is such thing as quality over quantity. Having hundreds of social accounts and instances can dilute the relevance and quality of the message and content; and the majority of the time the brand will be completely unaware as to how many account they even own.
Even more worryingly, with the introduction of the Cookies Law last year, many brands may be caught out by the number of dormant and incompliant sites that have lain dormant and unregulated. The larger scale upon which a company operates, the more places in which it likely resides and the more difficult to manage. Simply put, the abundance of official and unofficial brand pages, groups and profiles across the web have made it extremely difficult for brands to track and evaluate their online assets.
The challenge for organisations lies in ensuring they can properly govern their social channels and use internal benchmarks to determine which channels are most effective at delivering return-on-investment for marketing spend.
Management of the digital real estate is increasingly a vital element to brand strategy, especially for large organisations undergoing acquisitions and mergers. By gaining control over a digital real estate, companies can quickly identify and act upon residual non-compliant or dormant accounts left over in the wake of such an event.
By fully evaluating the extent of its digital real estate, companies can then begin to benchmark their social accounts against each other to establish best practice, compliance, and corporate governance. Equipped with this understanding, brands can then begin to measure themselves against competitors’ social accounts, informing new ways to improve their communications.
This can also have a knock-on effect on the marketing industry as a whole, as companies can use mapping technology to measure themselves against competitors, encourage innovation and put in place responsible compliance measures.
By properly aligning their messaging with online communications across a consistent digital platform, brands can then ensure they are delivering highly targeted and relevant marketing campaigns that will appeal to their target audiences. Effective mapping of a digital real estate means brands can consolidate and optimise marketing activity and customer experience, leveraging this to both build awareness of their business proposition and unearth true brand advocates.
